The Big-Bong Theory

I meet Michel Gondry for the first time in the East Village, in New York City, in this little coffee shop. He rides up on his bike and chains it to a light pole outside. He's coming from the bookstore, where he bought a volume of philosophy written in French that he has in a paper bag. He says the name of it but I can't understand it with his accent. You can mostly understand what Gondry says. But sometimes he'll say, for instance, "all cool anonyms" (I'll decode this later), and you can only say "What" so many times before you start to feel like an asshole.

You know how famous people, or people who have been coddled and think they're famous, act like everyone's looking at them even when they're not Michel Gondry doesn't do that. Most people in his position would act that way. Gondry has been told since basically the first frame he ever shot how amazing he is. He has the kind of manifest talent that means he didn't even have to be ambitious. First he made a music video for this band he was in, in France; Björk saw it and was like, I want that guy to direct my video; then all these other people—Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers, the White Stripes—asked him to make their videos; then he directed a movie that Charlie Kaufman wrote that no one really liked (Human Nature), and then another Charlie Kaufman movie that everyone loved and that he shared a screenwriting Oscar for (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and then the concert movie Dave Chappelle's Block Party, and then a movie he wrote and directed himself, The Science of Sleep, that lots of people were annoyed by but that almost everyone would agree was made by a man of special talents. But sitting in this coffee shop, he just looks like some guy who went to Hampshire College in the '80s and now makes collages at his place on Avenue B. Which is where he actually lives. He is seen around here often, and in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where, someone told me, he is known for meeting and dating arty girls.

"I like it very much, this neighborhood," he says. "But it change in a way I don't like. It becomes gentrified."

"Well," I say, "you're kind of the guy gentrifying it."

Gondry stops moving. A bit of his cookie plunks into his tea. He has never considered that. He sees himself firmly in the camp of people who get gentrified, not the consumatrons who do the gentrifying.

"Would you ever live in L.A." I ask.

"I did live in L.A. for four years," he says. "But you get really detached from the rest of the world. I think this show up in Hollywood movies. They reflect a way of life that's disengaged from the rest of the world. And maybe that's why Hollywood movies kind of adapt everywhere all over the world. Because there's nothing specific about them."

The previous day, I had seen his new movie, Be Kind Rewind, which is very specifically about Passaic, New Jersey. The people who follow Gondry's career are wondering what this movie's going to be like, since The Science of Sleep was such a boxoffice (and also, relatively speaking, critical) failure. Will he ever make another Eternal Sunshine is the essential question about him. With Be Kind, he went small; it simply doesn't have the scope to be a quoteunquote great film. The beginning is a little hokey. It's super "Let's put on a show and save the town!" Like, it's literally about people putting on a show to save the town. The setup is really just an excuse to do these inspired Gondrystyle lofi remakes of movies like Ghostbusters and Driving Miss Daisy and a little home movie at the end that has this weird strain of joy and humanity that made me cry. The same way I cried when I saw Block Party, but a different way than I cried at Eternal Sunshine, because Sunshine is his one film about being an adult. I don't get into this essential Gondrian conflict yet—the hokey versus the inspired—because we are going to see each other again in a week, in Tokyo, where he's making a short film. Instead, I ask what kind of cinematic sleight of hand (he's known for lofi, clever effects) he's been thinking about lately.

"I think about time travel lately," he says. "I have an idea to make a time machine on YouTube with a blue screen." His sleights require very little in the way of budget or production, which make them perfect for YouTube. There's a YouTube video where he does a Rubik's Cube with his feet—the trick is that he messed it up with his feet and then ran the film backward. The tossedoff quality of the video is part of the reason it tricks you. But about the time travel: "I've always been into physics, astronomy. I read a lot about this astrophysician [sic, Gondryism] who is coming from Vietnam and teaching at the University of Virginia. Trang…Trang I'm going to give you his name tomorrow because I can never remember it. I got in touch with him through email, and I ask him question about the big bong [sic, Gondryism] and stuff."

I say, That's funny, the big bong. Because his movies kind of do what getting high does: heighten small, ordinary human emotions (rejection, loneliness, the crush) and stretch reality to the breaking point. Hee hee. He bridles. This is something about him: He bridles, especially when you're trying to interpret him to him. He finds almost any interpretation of him to be diminutive.

"Oh. I don't do drug," he says. "So I can't say. I drink occasionally, but I would never be drunk to watch a movie."

I talked to Steve Golin, a producer on Eternal Sunshine, and he said, "Michel is unbelievably sensitive. And also can be insensitive to other people. He's like a 12yearold boy! When he gets upset because he doesn't get what he wants, he stomps his feet and says, ‘Why why why!' It's hysterical. I love Michel. He's a complicated guy, and he's not like a normal guy. But he's supergifted and he's got a really good heart, an extraordinary heart."

Gondry and I talk more. He thinks it'd be terrible to be famous the way an actor is. He's really into graphic novels. He loves the director Paul Verhoeven, especially his film Starship Troopers because it shows war to be the fascist act that it fundamentally is. He is upset that the Crash that recently won best picture borrowed its title from a movie by David Cronenberg that he very much loved. He was kind of amazed when he watched the DVD extras on Life Aquatic and the director, Wes Anderson, makes Bill Murray repeat a single line, like, forty times for one take; Gondry wants his movies to have an improvised feel, not an enforced perfection. Over time, an impression coalesces: He sits with his legs crossed the way women, Europeans, and Democrats cross their legs. He's pale. None of his clothes are the right color. His sweatshirt is a weird tint of green, and his suede shoes are a weird blue. I don't think he would ever wear clothes that were the right color. That would violate his principles. He has facial hair that grows only over the middle part of his face, and it's pale like his hair and his eyes. He might be close to albino. People say he looks like a wood sprite or, if you put the pointy ears on him, an elf. I would say maybe a sad posthuman creature from our future. Or wait: the Petit Prince. He looks almost exactly like the Petit Prince, from either the book or the movie or just from your imagination. He's the Petit Prince all grown up and moved to Alphabet City, rummaging around usedbook stores for philosophy books in French and dating arty girls from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and drawing cartoons with his 16yearold son. Which is pretty much what the Petit Prince would do if he were alive and 40 years old.

The next time I see Michel Gondry, he's sitting in front of a video monitor on a soundstage outside of Tokyo waiting for the crew to light something. They've built a model of a tiny apartment on the soundstage, and a static image of its interior flickers on the screen. His girlfriend is next to him, a cartoonist named Gabrielle Bell. This movie—a short that's part of a threefilm, threedirector project about Tokyo—is about a girl who turns into a chair, and it's based on a comic that Gabrielle drew. She also cowrote the screenplay, with Gondry, which someone translated into Japanese. Gabrielle, in red cords and a pilly knit cap, is long, with long limbs like stretched taffy. She sits next to Michel, quietly drawing in her journal.

"Come on!" Michel shouts to no one in particular. "It should have been done already! It's very simple."

Some Japanese people laugh shyly at him and continue to do obscure things with rolls of tape and sheets of plastic.

"Okay, let's roll! Let's roll! What's wrong"

He exhales and bends over and Gabrielle starts karatechopping his back and he says, "Ohohohohoh" and "ahahahahah."

The shoot is going to last twentyone days, and for most of those days, Michel and Gabrielle will take the train out here from central Tokyo—fortyfive minutes, three trains, rocking along through the antiseptic chaos of Tokyo with sleeping salarymen that Gabrielle will draw in her book. I can't imagine Brett Ratner taking the train out to suburban Tokyo to shoot a small movie with an entirely Japanese crew who mostly don't speak English for very little money. It's part of the reason, Gondry explains, that he decided to do this project.

"It's fun to get out of your element," he says. "I like the train because a little bit I can do thing like everyone else, like a normal person. It make me stimulated. To keep connected to the real world."

Gondry doesn't have a largerthanlife personality, doesn't preside over the set in a beret with a bullhorn and give rousing speeches and make coarse jokes. He's not all kinetic energy and bluster and charisma. The fact that he is who he is, that is his charisma. That, and generally being sweet with people. Though if you study him for a minute, you can see fatigue below the sweetness, like they didn't fully inflate his face this morning. He almost never sleeps very well, though he is a notorious dreamer. That's what The Science of Sleep was all about,

Michel Gondry and his weird dreams.

"When I couldn't sleep last night, I respond to every email," he says to some of the crew. "Especially spam. Dear SoandSo. I would not like a longer penis. I think I am fine. But please keep me aware of any other product that I could be interest in!"

The assistant director laughs, and Michel says to Gabrielle, "See, look how much he appreciate my sense of humor."

"I didn't know we were competing to see who can appreciate your sense of humor better," she says. She laughs and then looks worried, like she started out making a joke but wonders whether it was totally a joke. She goes back to her sketchbook. She draws everything longer and sadder than it appears in real life, like she's making the world over in her image.

They begin shooting, and you can start to see where the Gondry part of the movie comes in. That is, aside from this tiny apartment that he's had constructed on the soundstage, choked with old clothes, a ceramic dog, pots and pans, the people living in the embryonic sac of their own mundane crap. Gondry makes movies about people with lives and apartments that normal people might have: haphazard, not stylized. Even his elaborate, surreal special effects are connected to the real world. He's the anti–Nancy Meyers. Anyway, the Gondry part is introduced when a Japanese guy with a cigarette behind his ear brings out this prosthetic torso that has, where the solar plexus should be, some bloody wooden slats. Like everything Gondry does—his music videos, his movies, his lifestyle decisions—this film has a central metaphor. It's about a girl who feels useless and, as she is transformed into a chair, feels some relief. Kafka by way of Brooklyn set in Tokyo.

"We use mostly prosthetic," he says. "I don't like to use too much CGI for this. If you do it just in postproduction, I don't think you're going to feel anything when you see it. This is more visceral. A little bit like David Cronenberg. His effect are very visceral, because they are really there. He's the master of this type of metamorphosis—I hope I'm up to his level. It's a terrible transformation that come from a mundane thing."

The metaphorical fantasy of the mundane: That's what you need for a Gondry movie. And of course it has to be in the service of a theory. Gondry is extremely French in his belief in theories, which seems pretty antiquated by now. The twentieth century was about the big idea; people seem mostly postideological now, especially in the movie business. "There is too much CGI used in movie," he says. "There are so many things to do that are more striking and affecting than to manipulate pil by pil with computer. They do it to be lazy. When they use the computer to avoid the actor being in a real car, in a real landscape, when you see the actor didn't bother going to such and such a location to do their job, I feel cheated. I feel disengage. It disengage me."

Gondry's movies are as much about how they're made as they are about the pain of loss (Sunshine and Sleep, the two Gondryest movies). The dream sequences in Sleep are astonishingly laborintensive and minute, but they're also accomplished almost wholly using materials anyone could buy and methods anyone could use if only he'd thought of it. And that's what he's about.

"My movies are a little bit closer to the same feeling—you watch it and you feel like you're making it at the same time. And people joke about that. They say I am Mr. Cardboard, and I have a lot of people making fun. But that is my goal."

In the morning, location shooting starts. First in a building of micro apartments stacked like rusty clothes dryers twelve stories high. Then in another apartment complex, abandoned, where there are mahjongg tiles and mosquito coils littered on the grounds, like someone blew up Hong Kong. While the crew takes forever lighting something, Gondry and I sit in this room with dwarf ceilings and tatami mats and talk about the possibility that he has a tragic flaw as a director. It starts like this.

"Did you see in New York magazine that they did a review of your Be Kind Rewind trailer They said, Michel Gondry discovers YouTube."

"I'm not too bad in YouTube," he says. "I get quite a lot of hit in general. But there is a lot of guy who get really immense hit. Like this Norwegian guy who does this drum thing. I did that ten years ago. The whole medium of quirky animation, all—or a very large amount of people—who are producing stuff in this medium really are derivative of me." Then he laughs. "I have to be careful because I hear this type of comment, and I get very defensive and say, Oh, I did this before! I try to make fun of myself when I feel this way strongly. It make you look petty when you can't refrain but to say, Oh, it's not fair this guy is given much more recognition than me."

I paraphrase what Steve Golin said about this trait: "He's got a huge ego and he's hugely competitive. So I mean he's a very complicated guy, because on the one hand he is generous and great. And on the other he's judgmental and competitive, and he can be petty." Gondry more or less agrees. You have to write the truth, he says.

In the spirit of truth, I tell him something else Golin talked about: the fact that Eternal Sunshine was the product of great compromise. I didn't quote him fully, but this is what Golin said: "When I worked on Eternal with him, Charlie Kaufman and the producers spent a lot of time trying to rein in some of Michel's creativity. Michel has so many ideas, all the time. He has literally hundreds of brilliant ideas in a day. And the trick as a producer with Michel is to keep the ideas reined in, so they work in the context of what the narrative is. And when you are working with a director who's coming off a movie that's not that successful—because at the end of the day, Human Nature, his first film, was not all that successful—it's easier to deal with them. And everybody said, Listen, your last movie wasn't a success, so stop being so confident that you're always right." You could say that Sleep is what happens when these impulses are unimpeded.

Gondry agrees that there was a struggle. He says the whole movie was a compromise, but in the end there was nothing in Sunshine that he (and Charlie Kaufman and Steve Golin) didn't want in there.

But what if what he really needs is a counterweight The Charlie Kaufman (adult) for the Michel Gondry (child)

"I think if Charlie would call me and want to collaborate, I would," Gondry says. "But he's directing his movie. And there are not so many writer who can compare to Charlie Kaufman, to be honest. I don't want to be dismissive, but it's very hard to find something that doesn't feel completely controlled by a bunch of ecutive who think they know exactly what is good for the audience. So I'm like, Well, I better try to write my own."

I don't think Gondry can pull back enough to consider whether this is a flaw, tragic or not. A new impression of Gondry asserts itself. A man of great talents and powerful ideas, no longer the wunderkind with limitless potential, 44 years old, living in the East Village with his son, Paul—a bilingual 16yearold who paints and draws and has parties in the apartment when Michel is gone—and in complete thrall to his own creativity, a force too big for him to wrestle. I don't think it occurs to him to try.

The plot ofBe Kind is that these two video clerks in Passaic, New Jersey, accidentally erase all the videos in their store. It happens—Michel, come on, seriously—because Jack Black gets magnetized. But Gondry's just trying to get to the part where he can bring into play the film's concept (there is always a concept with Gondry, whether it's dating a beautiful shy cartoonist or making a music video like the Daft Punk one where he breaks down the music into visual components—each sound is a different fantastical character—and sets them in repeating choreographed motion, trying to literally translate electronica into the visual). The concept is that these guys decide to remake the movies that people want to rent, and those become even more popular than the original movies, and eventually the whole town makes a movie together about the life of Fats Waller (don't worry if all the dots aren't connecting for you) that is not only supposed to earn enough money to save the video store and the community fabric of the town of Passaic, but also snatch the life of the truly independent film from the clutches of Hollywood and Blockbuster.

"Eventually, at the end of Be Kind," he says, "they make their own movie. That's really what it's about. To make your own what you want to watch. For yourself. Not to be part of a commercial system."

We are back in New York now. Gondry is drinking tea in his walkup apartment. Old furniture, stacks of DVDs, paintings by his kid. There's a dirty sofa and a Formica table in the kitchen—again, more the habitat of the Hampshire grad selfpublishing his zine than of a famous movie director. He explains that the day before the film opens, he will unveil an exhibit at the Deitch gallery in New York that will actually be a doityourself studio where people will be invited to come and make their own films. Like in the movie.

"The main room would sort of be a mini back lot. Like you have the interior of a car and you have the street moving behind it, and with the gas pedal you can make it faster or slower. And you have an office and a street, a bathroom, all the generic thing you need to make a story possible. And there's going to be a big light switch in the room that will be ‘Night' or ‘Day,' because in a screenplay you always start with Day or Night."

This is not supposed to be art so much as a metaphorical machine.

"I write a protocol for people to start their own film club like this. Ultimately, you would have film club in a lot of different places, even different countries. Then they can start to exchange between cities. And basically it would be like having a system like all cool anonyms [eventually I understand this as "Alcoholics Anonymous"], a very powerful system that's completely unadvertised. It can't be bought by anything. It's completely utopistic. How you say, utopist. It will probably never work. So I do it in the gallery for now."

Gondry's career is a kind of oneman version of the film club, whether here or in Tokyo (why else would you do this project but to have a purer creative experience, away from Hollywood, etc.) or at Spike Jonze's house, where he and Spike used to shoot "exquisite corpse" films. (Spike shoots thirty seconds and shows Michel only the last frame, and then Michel shoots thirty seconds and shows Spike only the last frame. Again: Imagine Brett Ratner doing that if he weren't also getting teabagged.)

It's a struggle to get him to think about anything beyond the creative experience. I ask Raffi Adlan, Gondry's associate producer, about a story I heard: Gondry's former assistant used to make him sign the todo list every day because Gondry would habitually forget what he'd asked for. Not that he knew of, Adlan says, but there are systems in place now to help Gondry remember what he's asked for and of whom.

"Not only does he not want to be part of the Hollywood power structure," Steve Golin says, "he doesn't even understand it. He's not interested in any of that shit. He goes on vacation to the South of France and does art projects with his kid."

This—besides that talent and creativity—is what's remarkable about Gondry. Sure, he's competitive and ambitious and yearns for ever greater helpings of recognition. But almost everyone like him ends up getting hypnotized into believing in Hollywood's version of ambition: They end up making arty versions of Hollywood boilerplate. Especially people like Gondry, because it's those with that kind of singular visual aptitude who are used to dress up and shellac an artistic patina onto bigbudget genre movies. Tim Burton makes Batman Returns. Alfonso Cuarón makes Harry Potter movies. Michel Gondry makes…Be Kind Rewind. He has not, as yet, had the selfdeluding monologue that creative people in Hollywood have that goes: "I really shouldn't be so snobby; I should have fun. Movies are fun, and I want people to see my movies, right So I'll make Charlie's Angels 3." This isn't about whether you like the movies or not, or whether he has a tragic flaw as a director; it's about this man being both alarmingly talented and alarmingly ideological, almost reflexively so, and having the balls to put his money where his ideology is, be that in the East Village or in Tokyo.

Part of the Gondry ideology is to call attention to the fact that we mostly define ourselves through consumption. I am this shirt but not that fucking shirt; I am totally The Office but I ain't Two and a Half Men, and wait, The Office only used to be good. It doesn't matter whether it's high art or Fred Claus, we're committing the same act: consumption.

"I think there are two ways to see art and music," he says. "One way is to find contagious element to encourage people to make something. And one way is to really hypnotize people, assert your power. And I've always been on the side of the first."

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